Outer Heavens: What Metal Gear Went Up Against

Cover Story: Nuclear-capable walking tanks are all in a day's work compared to the gaming contemporaries Solid Snake faced.

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he Metal Gear franchise certainly holds some importance in the history of games, but to read about its accomplishments would make it seem like it was bulletproof. In some ways, yes, and in others, no. Every Metal Gear game, from the simple 8-bit originals to the most advanced sequels of recent years has been in the company of similar games that tried -- or at least were presented to be -- going for their proverbial throats. As you'll learn, it was relatively easy for Metal Gear to stand out in the beginning, but as decades went on, its marquee status morphed to a state where it now sits in somewhat dangerous territory. But no matter what your feelings are about Metal Gear games, you probably have some about the following competition through the years, as well.

"Military" Games of the '80s

In the beginning, Metal Gear was fresh. Perhaps too fresh. Whether it was the original MSX games or the bastardized NES versions, few rivals came up to challenge Konami's new breed of action/adventure games. (Maybe someone could have compared them to The Legend of Zelda, but that's still a stretch.) Hideo Kojima wanted to change the idea of action games by making one where the objective was sneaking, not killing. And by using the settings and themes he did for Metal Gear, he also tweaked the idea of what a "military action" game could be.

It wasn't really hard, though -- in the '80s, most games with military themes were taking a page from Rambo movies and everything else like it: one man against a province's worth of bad guys, and who shoots first and asks... well, he doesn't ask anything. Games like Ikari Warriors, Heavy Barrel, Commando, and Konami's own Rush'n Attack were practically all shoot-em-ups that took you from one end of a war-torn nation to the other, with a string of explosions along the way. Ikari creators SNK, in particular, had seemingly tried to start a monopoly of military action games, and none of them were very subtle. Including Ikari sequels, there was Guerrilla War, Time Soldiers, Iron Tank, and several others that all shared Metal Gear's bird's-eye view, but "stealth" was not in their vocabularies. Even P.O.W., which you might think would focus on escaping your captors with the least resistance, is more about brute-forcing your way through waves of guards and other fighters who have big guns.

The key differentiator between these games and Metal Gear, though, was not so much the presentation, but the platform. Virtually all of those high-energy Rambo-type games originated in the arcades, where "fast and loud" was just part of the trade. Metal Gear, on the other hand, was slow and tense, and the series pretty much never left the home market. You didn't need to use a gun in Metal Gear, and if the game sucked you in, you probably didn't want to (though in fairness, the gunplay wasn't that great to begin with). Solid Snake was a bad-ass military agent, but his methods were refreshingly realistic: sneak in, clear the room, gather intelligence, and only use lethal force when necessary. Making that into an arcade game would have been foolish, because no one went to an arcade to be careful.

Regardless, both Metal Gear games were praised in their day, but failed to turn the tides of those balls-to-the-wall military games hitting arcades and consoles for years on end. Fortunately for Kojima, he got the last laugh later on.

Syphon Filter

When Metal Gear was reborn for the PlayStation, the scene was similar to how it was before: an influx of brain-dead action games, and the new Kojima creation that would open your eyes. Metal Gear Solid wowed people from its first reveal, with an immersive world that played out (and looked like) a movie much more than the old 8-bit games did. But the 32-bit generation was the sign of a maturing industry, and original (or at least tweaked) ideas were becoming more common. And so, in what was mostly a coincidence, Metal Gear had its first respectable rival around the same time it was finished: Syphon Filter, from Sony and Eidetic (now Bend Studio).

Superagent Gabe Logan works for The Agency, a highly specialized counterterrorist group. He's on the trail of a bad guy in possession of a biological weapon (the titular Syphon Filter), and will be sent around the world to suss him out and leave a trail of dead henchmen in his wake. Gabe has a variety of guns and other gadgets to help him on his missions, and is guided by an Asian-American woman who often radios in with intel. Sound familiar? While MGS had received a lot of hype for years before its release, the quick appearance of Syphon Filter was surprising. Syphon Filter was released in America just a couple of months after MGS, so any little coincidence between the two was magnified.

The two games were a decent match for one another, but in practice, Syphon Filter was not a copycat. For one thing, the early installments were not as focused on sneaking around and avoiding enemies, but rather seeking out enemies that are hiding and blowing them away. In other words, "stealth" made up a mission or two, not the whole game. Nevertheless, Logan and Snake's professions were similar enough to spark a war of comparisons among gamers and game media. If you took, say, Syphon Filter's side, it may have been because you didn't like the stop-and-go stealth play of MGS, or its reliance on long cut-scenes that tell a somewhat nonsense-filled story. If you were a Metal Gear convert, maybe you spun those arguments into positives, because anybody could have made an action game like Syphon Filter.

Whatever the case, Syphon Filter went on to be a reliable, if not necessarily blockbuster franchise for Sony, with several sequels released before stopping -- for the time being -- on the PSP. Metal Gear Solid went on to be a much bigger worldwide hit for the PS1, and besides, Kojima had bigger fish to fry.

Splinter Cell

Video games got supercharged at the start of the 21st century, and Metal Gear was now at the forefront of the next generation. The first MGS made Metal Gear a household name instead of just a nostalgic memory, and Metal Gear Solid 2 was poised to take the throne of the PlayStation 2. But this time, the rest of the game industry was wiser to the concepts Metal Gear games gave us, and various copycats rose up to try and give fans a different kind of stealth action game. But they were small time compared to Ubisoft's Splinter Cell.

Hardened longtime SEAL Sam Fisher is called back out of retirement to infiltrate a foreign government and rescue captured CIA agents. With night-vision goggles strapped to his head, Sam heads in and does his damnedest to get through enemy lines as invisibly as possible. However, things escalate far beyond a simple extraction mission, with an international plot that even involves the threat of war with China.

Finally, MGS had a competitor that emphasized stealth to an equal measure, but Splinter Cell was (relatively) more firmly grounded in reality. The Tom Clancy brand houses games with just as much heart-pumping action as Metal Gear, but without dipping their toes too far in science fiction (insert joke about sentient disembodied arms). This was part of enhancing the appeal of the game to gamers who felt they were above the "silliness" of Metal Gear stories. It was also a showcase for the original Xbox, one of the PS2's biggest competitors, so that opened the floodgates for a ton of gamers to point out how much better the graphics in Splinter Cell were over MGS 2. In all seriousness, it did have awesome shadow effects.

And of course, it helped that the game itself was good. The emphasis on staying in the shadows and how easy it would be to die if Sam were spotted heightened the tension and reinforced the importance of being careful, whereas in MGS 2, you could just duck into a locker when the alert phase was brought down a notch. MGS 2 also had 100% more tedious bomb-freezing, teenage girl-escorting, and the mere existence of Raiden, so for many, Splinter Cell's down-to-business approach was a breath of fresh air.

Splinter Cell was still Metal Gear's chief rival when Metal Gear Solid 3 was released. At the time, MGS 3 was in between the releases of the second and third Splinter Cell games, and both of those pushed captivating multiplayer modes on top of the single-player campaign. Similarly, MGS 3 Subsistence, released two years later, would introduce Metal Gear Online, a multiplayer-focused variation of MGS. While MGO was fun, it didn't quite get the widespread attention that Splinter Cell multiplayer matches did, for various reasons that went beyond gameplay (like the more reliable Xbox Live service, for one).

Since then, Splinter Cell went through a few ups and downs. The canonical fourth game was a letdown no matter which of the two distinct versions you played, and Splinter Cell Conviction went through development hell before finally coming out the other end relatively unscathed, though it still wasn't what many fans expected. Meanwhile, Metal Gear's trajectory was heading straight for MGS 4 on PlayStation 3, though it couldn't escape trouble even if Sam Fisher wasn't around.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

When MGS 4 arrived, Syphon Filter and Splinter Cell had more or less checked out for a spell, leaving the new Metal Gear an opportunity to make a bigger splash. Though many considered it the PlayStation 3's killer app (even before they played it), MGS 4 was repeating history, as a wave of less stealth-focused military-themed games were approaching -- and this time, it would put Metal Gear's relevance in a questionable position.

As mentioned, in the '80s, "military" games were like Rambo. In the 2000s, they were like Saving Private Ryan. World War II-themed first-person shooters were everywhere thanks to progenitors like EA's Medal of Honor series. Call of Duty was a worthy new entry in that field, but when developer Infinity Ward took things up a notch with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the game, as they say, had changed. Though World War II was its own special brand of hell for those who fought in it, the fictional conflict in Modern Warfare let its developers be as brash as they wanted to: insanely daring missions using present-day weapon technology that led to a Russian invasion of America? That's the kind of story you can feel; less so the one about the cyborg ninja slicing up big walking robots that moo. Not to mention a highly addictive multiplayer mode that ended up being the cornerstone of the Modern Warfare series.

Had Call of Duty not existed, Metal Gear Solid 4 still had big challenges. The top-down views of the past MGS games where the best advice Snake gets is to "go north" were on the edge of being obsolete in 2007. Thankfully, third-person shooters were not yet dead, thanks to the success of games like Gears of War, and even open-world games like Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto IV. Those Western-borne hits of the day (and probably Splinter Cell, too) were directly influential on MGS 4, and the result was a game that not only looked contemporary, but played like it, too: aiming and shooting was better, OctoCamo was fun to use, and the instant gratification of buying extra weapons and ammo when (usually) needed was a load off.

But by now you should know what happened: COD basically co-opted MGS 4's slogan "No place to hide," as it became a force to be reckoned with, with Modern Warfare and its sequels selling in unfathomably large numbers. Upon release, MGS 4 was generally well-received to begin with and definitely sold well, but soon it was met with the same vitriol towards its story that people rained on the previous games. The stakes were simply higher this generation, and even though MGS 4 made several bona fide improvements to its formula and tied up a few loose story ends, it wasn't enough for an increasingly cynical public that was already being blown away by shooters from the West with their own self-importance -- not just Call of Duty, but Battlefield, Gears of War, and BioShock, to name a few. And then the next big Metal Gear game was on PSP, which didn't help its perception outside Japan all that much.

Does this mean it's over? Will Metal Gear be relegated to niche status from here on out? Possibly not, if you hear the rumors about what Kojima is using the Fox Engine for, but there's no doubt that Metal Gear, be it Solid or Rising, faces a tougher battle than it ever did before.

Splinter Cell

was one of the first Xbox games I bought for my system. I was never a huge Metal Gear fan, and still am not although I've played 2 and 3. I think they are great games and very unique, but I've never been drawn into them like the mllions of fans. Splinter Cell on the other hand absolutely blew me away. I liked Tom Clancy games to begin with and this one really was a breath of fresh air. Pandora Tomorrow's inclusion of the Spy vs. Mercenary (3rd Person Stealth vs. 1st Person Shooter if you're unfamiliar) was unlike ANYTHING i'd ever seen in an online game, and STILL is one of my favorite online games of all time. This article makes me want to play through Metal Gear Solid 2 again though!